E-commerce: Anything but a bargain sometimes

I will happily sing the praises of some online shopping experiences (Amazon’s Subscribe & Save comes to mind), but there are drawbacks to e-commerce that no amount of technological innovation seem to have eliminated. I am speaking, of course, of returns.

Recently, I ordered something, decided I no longer wanted or needed it, then noticed that the receipt said I could go to a retail outlet to return the item I had ordered online. Sweet! This way, I wouldn’t have to find a printer (we don’t own one), print out a return slip, and get $6.95 or so knocked off the refund for shipping and handling costs. All the in-store return would cost me was my time. Hello, multichannel e-commerce! Truly, the future of retail is here!

Except it’s not: the in-store systems refused to recognize the product codes emblazoned on the actual product packaging or the packing slip that came with it. Using the in-store kiosk only made the situation more frustrating: The web site reset my account password, then claimed the order didn’t exist, despite the packing slip — and physical object — that said otherwise. When I got the attention of a customer service manager, she called up the store’s proprietary system and they claimed that the object I had ordered never actually existed. This when we were both looking at it.

Bizarrely, when I went home and clicked the online returns link on the website, I was able to go through the returns process easily — albeit once I had made my peace with the $6.95 shipping hit and the fact that once again, a company had managed to offload its printing and processing costs onto the consumer.

The entire experience left me wondering: Why must e-commerce penalize people for pinching pennies? Shoppers get zinged if they don’t own a printer — which strikes me as ridiculous, since it’s not like bricks-and-mortar consumers are required to supply stores with cash register tape or shopping bags. They get zinged if they don’t want to pay shipping on returns. Even if something’s a “bargain” online, there are a lot of hidden costs for consumers.

I still think that when deployed correctly, a multichannel retailer’s online/in-store experiences can be great for consumers. (For example, I had a positive experience returning website-purchased products at a Crate & Barrel store.) But when done poorly, it feels like punishment for shoppers who only wanted to maximize the convenience of both website and bricks-and-mortar channels.

What do you think? Do you make it a policy only to patronize places that have free shipping on returns? Share your opinions in the comments or write to dollarsandsense@sfgate.com.